Compact representation of video is essential to many information query and retrieval applications. Examples of such applications range from multi-media database access to skimming (fast forwarding) through a video clip. Most previous approaches have mainly concentrated on splitting a given video segment into "shots." Each shot is represented by a keyframe which summarizes the shot. Thus one may view these representative frames instead of browsing through the entire video. Shot detection may be achieved with high accuracy (&gt;90%) and few misses (&lt;5%). Histogram based approaches are among the most successful shot detection strategies as well as being the least computationally demanding. A comparison between various shot detection strategies may be found in the literature. Many of these schemes also take into account some special situations of interest: pan, zoom, dissolve and fade in determining video shot boundaries.
Known techniques generally concentrate on detecting shot boundaries or scene changes and using a collection made up of a single frame from each shot as keyframes representing the video sequence. Assigning more than one keyframe to each shot provides better summaries representing the video content. Such known summarization methods, however, provide a single layer summary without any flexibility.
Other known techniques make use of color histograms and describe methods for forming histograms from MPEG bitstreams (e.g., histograms of DC coefficients of 8.times.8 block DCT). Although, this is relatively straightforward for I (intra-coded) frames, there is more than one way of recovering DC (zero frequency) coefficients of a P (predicted) frame or B (bi-directionally predicted) frame with minimal decoding of its reference picture.
Known references that are concerned with discrete cosine transformation (DCT)-compressed video however, do not address at all the practical aspects of a working system. For example, after they are identified, keyframes have to be decoded for visual presentation. None of the known references specify an efficient mechanism for decoding keyframes that may be positioned at arbitrary locations of the bitstream, without decoding the entire video sequence.
A major limitation of the above schemes is that they treat all shots equally. In most situations it might not be sufficient to represent the entire shot by just one frame. This leads to the idea of allocating a few keyframes per each shot depending on the amount of "interesting action" in the shot. The current state of the art video browsing systems thus split a video sequence into its component shots and represent each shot by a few representative keyframes, where the representation is referred to as "the summary".
The invention improves and extends the method disclosed by L. Lagendijk, A. Hanjalic, M. Ceccarelli, M. Soletic, and E. Persoon, "Visual Search in SMASH System", Proceedings of International Conference on Image Processing, pp. 671-674, Lausanne, 1996, hereinafter "Lagendijk.".